Lucy Bethia Walford
Essayist, Journalist & Novelist | 1845-1915
Lucy Bethia Walford, née Colquhoun (1845-1915), was born into a family of minor authors. Her father, John Colquhoun, wrote The Moor and the Loch, and her mother, Frances Sarah Fuller Maitland, was a poet and hymn writer. Her great-aunt, Catherine Sinclair, wrote fiction for children and adults, and Walford recalled with pleasure “the vivid descriptions of fashionable life and pages of racy dialogue” through which Sinclair conveyed her moral lessons.
Walford grew up in Edinburgh and enjoyed long holidays in the Highlands. She was educated by a governess, and her childhood reading included novels by Susan Ferrier, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Edward Bulwer Lytton. She was also very found of Scrope’s sporting books. A talented artist, Walford exhibited paintings at the Royal Scottish Academy’s annual show several years running.
Walford came of age during “the days of albums and manuscript books” and she disguised her own compositions among transcriptions of others’ works. In her memoir, Recollections of a Scottish Novelist, she recalls, “We transcribed music, poverty, passages from favourite authors. Little, ladylike compositions of our own in prose and verse were also common enough — sometimes in the shape of riddles…so that although my rough drafts were often hurriedly scrawled in the bathroom, of all places, kneeling by the edge of the bath! — I could make a fair copy of them without provoking ill-timed curiosity.” Walford describes her first full-length story as a “barefaced imitation” of Walter Scott, written in “high-flown Scottese of the most blatant type.” Her second attempt, “The Moderator’s Breakfast” was about the breakfast held during the annual meeting of the General Assembly in Edinburgh, which she pictured as a “Paradise to ministers’ daughters, perhaps brought from the ends of the Scottish earth.” Her first story to be published, “The Merchant’s Sermon,” appeared in the Sunday Magazine in 1865.
In June of 1869, she married Alfred Saunders Walford, a magistrate of Ilford, Essex, and the moved to London. They had two sons and five daughters. Several of Walford’s novels were published serially in Blackwood’s, including Pauline, The Baby’s Grandmother, and A Stiff-necked Generation; others appeared in Longman’s Magazine. She wrote 45 novels in all and claimed that The Matchmaker was “the last three-volume novel accepted by Mudie’s Library.” In addition to novels, she wrote “stories, essays, poems” and what she described as “fugitive pieces” ranging from news bulletins to conversational anecdotes.
Bibliography
Lucy Bethia Walford, Recollections of a Scottish Novelist (London: Williams and Norgate, 1910).
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